1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed in general to the field of data processing systems. In one aspect, the present invention relates to cache memory management in data processing systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
As infrastructure costs continue to rise along with administration and support costs, customers are looking to reduce costs by consolidating infrastructure onto third party infrastructure (e.g., clouds) which provides the computing power without additional administration and support costs. However, there are challenges presented by consolidating workloads onto shared computing infrastructure without impacting performance. For example, cache performance can be seriously degraded by consolidating data from multiple disparate applications onto a single computing infrastructure when each application is forced to re-establish its memory footprint at each level of the cache hierarchy at dispatch time. While attempts have been made to control cache behavior and improve cache efficiency by moving cached data from one cache memory/location to another based on the use of that instance of the cached data, such solutions can result in inefficient allocation of cache resources in a cache hierarchy.